Morning Reflection
Wisdom was my first fixation.
From early on talk of “truth” surrounded me. It lead me to study philosophy — in particular the classical Greek philosophy of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. For a long time I felt that I was understanding more and getting to deeper levels of understanding, but what could I do with my knowledge? The amorphous form of what I got out of putting so much time into studying philosophy was unsettling to me. About 14 years ago, when I was 13, I started to study web programming — html, css, JavaScript. I started with HTML, and in my first hour of reading about it, I was making little web pages: I wrote code, and like magic to me, it displayed something in the web browser! So in my effort to find more tangible skills, programming seemed to be the best and most wide reaching option. From then on I would learn different languages on the side, sometimes very little, until I took it on full time in college.
I begrudgingly dealt with mathematics for a long time. I got into programming to make stuff happen. Mathematics in my early days was a hark back to the abstract nonsense in the vein of philosophy. When I started studying computer science seriously in college, mathematics took on a new form: I now saw it as a pure way of building knowledge about things that can be rigorously defended and expanded. To me, this is when mathematics brought everything in life together for me. Everything, every intellectual domain, can stimulate mathematical thinking.
Mathematics is the most precious human inheritance. With it, we can talk clearly about complicated systems, prove their properties, and do things like walk on the moon. It is clear to me that you can only go so far with solving problems in natural language. There becomes a point where the overhead of natural language is ridiculous and things begin to become nonsensical. I’d like you to write an essay on how Maxwell’s equations work in enough detail that we can then produce results from your precise statements… it’s never going to happen. This is why when I found the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein I was relieved that there seemed to be good support for this thinking.
